Twentieth-Century American Poetics, ed. by Dana Gioia,
               David Mason, and Meg Schoerke. (McGraw-Hill)

               Classic Writings on Poetry, ed. by William Harmon
               (Columbia University Press)

The twentieth century saw poetry fall victim to a neurotic obsession with the modern. Ezra Pound was the Patient Zero of this sickness, declaring in 1917 that "No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old." And his principle condemned poetry, like a decrepit mansion, to constant renovation. Each generation had to find its own way of being up-to-date, from William Carlos Williams ("A new Zeitgeist has possessed the world") to Charles Olson ("Verse now, 1950, if it is to get ahead... must, I take it, catch up"), all the way down to Alice Fulton ("Synthesis and unity are fundamentally premodern concepts... a truly engaged and contemporary poetry must reflect this knowledge").

But just as the Puritan could never be sure he was one of the elect, so the twentieth-century poet could never be certain he was writing in the way that "the age demanded" (as Pound put it in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley). The only hope was to recognize the state of grace from outward signs, to brandish one's modernness like a placard. So in style, too, the stakes of novelty were constantly being raised. Pound demanded "direct treatment of the 'thing,'" and Williams announced "we are through with the iambic pentameter"; Olson looked to "possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes," while Fulton plumps for "asymmetrical or turbulent composition."

Twentieth-Century American Poetics, where all these poets and fifty more can be found, often sounds like a madhouse, with each patient floridly expounding his delusion. This is a sign of its success as an anthology: the editors have faithfully reproduced the babel of our poetics. As the title suggests, the book is not quite an anthology of criticism. Some of these essays are occupied with race and gender rather than aesthetics, while some are too personal and fragmentary to be considered criticism. A definitive critical anthology would need to include a number of writers absent here, either because they are not major poets (R. P. Blackmur), or not American-born (I. A. Richards), or simply, inexplicably missing (John Crowe Ransom). But even with those omissions, it is a tremendously enlightening and interesting book, impressively hospitable to all points of view, and essential for anyone seriously engaged with contemporary poetry.

To fully understand how we got here, however, it is necessary to go back further — perhaps even to Plato, who leads off Classic Writings on Poetry. This anthology is not as happily edited. Many of its translations are obsolete, doubtless for reasons of copyright, and its headnotes are inadequate. (Nowhere, for instance, is it mentioned that Horace's Ars Poetica, given here in a prose translation, is written in verse.) Certain writers chosen for novelty do not justify their presence (Snorri Sturluson, Laura Riding Jackson), while modern languages other than English are totally unrepresented (no Dante, Boileau, or Schiller). The book's value is to bring together in one place the major essays of classical literary criticism, and of English and American criticism from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The beginning of modern thought about poetry lies in a return to Plato — a return which is also an overturning. For Plato, poetry was suspect on both ethical and ontological grounds. His first charge, that it "feeds and waters the passions," is no longer likely to dismay any reader of poetry. More challenging is the notion that poetry is deficient in its very being — that it is, as Socrates argues in the Republic, "third in the descent from nature." For Plato, only the Ideas, what Yeats called the "ghostly paradigms of things," are essentially real. Actual, concrete objects — a bed, a tree, a ship — merely copy that ideal reality; and fictions, poetic or painterly, only copy the copies. Even though poiesis means "making," then, Plato denies that the poet is "a creator and maker." At best "the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed... from the truth."

There are two ways of braving this Platonic contempt for poetry. The first way is Aristotle's, and might be called pragmatic. In his Poetics, Aristotle denies that there is a suprasensible realm of Ideas, insisting that our ordinary world is the only reality. And he honors poetry as an artful imitation of that reality. There is no disgrace in such imitation, because, as he points out, "imitation is one instinct of our nature." Moreover, because its imitation is deliberate and not slavish, poetry actually improves on reality, "making a likeness which is true to life and yet more beautiful."

Such a poetics honors the poet for accurate and subtle knowledge of the world and human life; and it values style as the means by which the poet communicates that knowledge. When the Aristotelian turns to criticism, as in the neoclassical essays in verse and prose of Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, he will attend mainly to practical rules and definitions, confident that — as Pope wrote in his Essay on Criticism — "Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd, / Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz'd."

The other way of looking at poetry, which became dominant in the early nineteenth century and remains deeply influential today, is the romantic. The romantic critic agrees with Plato that there is a divine realm, of which our world is a flawed reflection. But instead of scorning poetry as an imitation of the lower world, the romantic worships it as a means of direct access to the higher. Not philosophy but poetry becomes the ladder on which we ascend to the heavens. If this is a contradiction of the Platonist, it is no less alien to the Aristotelian, since it removes poetry from the realm of worldly understanding and secular skill. Instead of an art, poetry becomes a magic.

Sir Philip Sidney made the first approach towards this idea, significantly tying his "Defense of Poetry" to a subversive reading of Plato as "of all philosophers... the most poetical." Sidney praises poetry exactly insofar as it is not an imitation of life: "to borrow nothing of what is, has been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be." The poet is not only not "third in descent from nature," but, "lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature." And like every subsequent romantic critic, Sidney sees meter as, at best, a mere garment of poetry's spiritual body: "Verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified."

The high romantics of the early nineteenth century continued to disparage verse in theory, though they never abandoned it in practice. In the "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth lamented that "confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science." Poetry, on this view, is not metrical language, but a form of superior wisdom: "Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge — it is as immortal as the heart of man." It follows that one earns the title of poet, not by writing verse, but by spiritual excellence, "a more comprehensive soul than [is] supposed to be common among mankind." No wonder that, as Coleridge recalled in Biographia Literaria, "Mr. Wordsworth's admirers... were found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong ability and meditative minds, and their admiration... was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervor."

This religious conception of poetry shifts its focus from the poem, an object with certain formal qualities, to the poet, who writes to express his extraordinary insight. Only in this light can we understand the strange pronouncements of Coleridge, that "a poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry"; of Shelley, that "A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry'... when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline"; or of Emerson, that "when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer." Poetry, it seems, is not poems; it is not an art practiced by the poet; and it cannot be found in even the greatest poets of the past. It has become a name for a mystic experience that can never be more than approximately described, as in Shelley's Platonic rhapsody: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not."

Certainly no poet today would subscribe to Shelley's creed. But our understanding of poetry is still profoundly influenced by romanticism, if only because modernism and postmodernism were dialectical responses to it. Modernism, under the (more modest and useful) name of symbolism, came to French poetry before English. But the French symbolists were themselves influenced by an American, the much-misunderstood Edgar Allan Poe. And Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition," usefully included in Classic Writings, was a torpedo aimed directly at romanticism and its religious pretensions.

Far from being "the first and last of all knowledge," Poe says, a poem is simply a technology for producing aesthetic sensations. When we think we are being elevated by a poem, we are really being stimulated by "some amount of suggestiveness — some undercurrent, however indefinite, of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness... which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal... Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness... which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement or pleasurable elevation of the soul." By divorcing poetic pleasure from all ethical and metaphysical concerns, Poe returns our focus to the poem itself, which now becomes only a pattern of stimuli — as he demonstrates in his cold-blooded account of writing "The Raven." Filtered through symbolism, this became the dominant understanding of poetry among the American modernists.

Moving from Classic Writings to Twentieth-Century American Poetics, we can trace the influence of this austere principle on Pound, Eliot ("The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art"), and Stevens ("A poet's words are things that do not exist without the words"). In the New Criticism of the 1930s and 1940s, the idea was reduced to an academic doctrine. "The meaning of poetry," Allen Tate declared, is "its 'tension,' the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it." Or, as the young Yvor Winters put it, the poem "is not a means to any end, but is in itself an end."

The criticism of the mid-twentieth century is largely an attack on the formalism of what Kenneth Rexroth called "the Reactionary Generation." (This makes it all the more regrettable that the New Critics are under-represented in Twentieth-Century American Poetics.) "No avant-garde American poet," Rexroth declared in 1957, "accepts the... thesis that a poem is an end in itself, an anonymous machine for providing aesthetic experiences." Instead, the influential poets of the 1950s and 1960s advanced a new ideal of the poem as a faithful record of experience. This notion receives different inflections at the hands of different poets, from Frank O'Hara to Muriel Rukeyser. For Charles Olson it is the outer world that must be recorded — "Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject' and his soul"; for Denise Levertov it is the inner sensation — "the sounds, acting together with the measure, are a kind of extended onomatopoeia — i.e., they imitate, not the sounds of an experience... but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture."

In their hatred of artifice, their loyalty to individual perception, these poets often sound like romantics. But in fact they resemble the romantics only as a double-negative resembles a positive. For they are not in search of transcendence, only of authenticity; the American generation that came after modernism could most accurately be called the Authentic poets. Not to falsify one's personal experience, even or especially in the name of art, is their great principle. The poem is only a means of synchronizing the reader's experience with the writer's: "The poem," O'Hara writes, "is at last between two persons instead of two pages."

It is in the pursuit of such authenticity that these poets made the great refusal about which the romantics only speculated: the immolation of meter, rhyme, and form. They took Emerson's notion of a "meter-making argument" more seriously than Emerson himself, turning "the metric movement," in Levertov's words, into "the direct expression of the movement of perception." For just the same reason, Olson praises the typewriter, which allows the poet to "indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables." Here is the aggressive egotism of authenticity, which does not simply hand the poem over to the reader, but compels the reader to follow the writer's instructions. And here too is its puritanism, its hostility to pleasure. For meter, like all artifice, finds pleasure in the gratuitous, and the gratuitous is the enemy of accuracy.

Today, the poetics of authenticity is well established. There have been isolated dissents from it (in Twentieth-Century American Poetics, for instance, the essays by J. V. Cunningham, Donald Justice, and Timothy Steele), but no comprehensive rejection. Yet it is clear by now that this poetics has thoroughly failed. It has not produced major poetry, and its criticism is remarkable only for intellectual crudity and rhetorical violence — the sound of the critical madhouse is a thousand utterly authentic voices, all talking at once. The work of many of our most ambitious poets, from John Ashbery to Jorie Graham, is damaged, if not actually vitiated, by its commitment to the ideal of the transcript.

In the last twenty years, however, criticism has done little to challenge that ideal. The most interesting essays from this period in Twentieth-Century American Poetics are not literary but sociological, examining the shortcomings of the institutional poetry world. In this category belong Robert Pinsky's thoughts on "poetry gloom," Donald Hall's on the "McPoem," and Dana Gioia's famous question, "Can Poetry Matter?" But the success or failure of American poetry is not determined by institutions — MFA programs, publishers, magazines. Like any poetry at any time, it will compel recognition, ours and posterity's, only by becoming great.

If criticism can make any contribution to this goal, it is to help us break free from the post-romantic dialectic that obsessed poetry in the twentieth century. For there is a saner, more sophisticated, more humane tradition in criticism: the pragmatic tradition of Aristotle. If we embrace it, we will not need to look to poetry for transcendence, or to flee into aestheticism when transcendence fails, or to flee into authenticity when aestheticism fails. We will be able to see how the twentieth century gave us poets of humane insight — Hardy, Frost, Moore, Larkin, Lowell — as well as poets of other-worldly magniloquence and hectic experimentalism. And if we are fortunate, our poetry will come to understand the full implications — ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic — of Horace's seemingly simple formula:

Of writing well, be sure, the secret lies
In wisdom: therefore study to be wise.

Poetry

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